Did I misplace my pince-nez again? Light reading on the 19th century.

Public Parks in the Nineteenth Century

While the making public of gardens in order to create people’s parks was something that first started in the eighteenth century, many public parks were created in the nineteenth century, as well.
When planning new cities or neighborhoods, parks started to be planned in. The most important reason was the increasing urbanisation and industrialism. The public park was meant to provide the working man with a little nature, when he couldn’t visit actual nature anymore because of the increasingly expanding city borders.

It was thought that public parks would help the population educate itself by learning from nature, as well as provide opportunities for exercise, for example walking or field sports. Another idea was that parks would help battle exessive drinking, because after a day of hard work, men could now take a walk in nature instead of drink beer at the local pub…That’s some sound Victorian reasoning, I think.

One of my favourite public parks is Berlin’s Tiergarten, redesigned in the 1840s by Lenné:

Unrelated: I’m in awe with this lady’s creations!. I was happily surprised to see she was from the same country as me, as well!

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3 Responses

I’ve never heard of parks as a deterrent from drinking. I wonder if it worked. In some ways it’s sad that industrialization and urbanization led to the need to “recreate” nature, so to speak. I enjoyed the post.